The invention pertains to the field of processing of data records for objects to be displayed on a video display. More particularly, the invention pertains to the field of video game processing of a plurality of objects on a playfield to determine which objects are visible on the portion of the playfield being displayed and which objects have collided with other objects.
As video games have become more complex and sophisticated they have progressed to multiple player games with multiple characters in conflict with multiple other entities with the battle taking place on ever more complex playfields. Because standard video display circuitry is used to display all this action, and because there are a large number of moving and non-moving objects on such playfields there have developed severe limits on the complexity of the game than can be depicted. This is because the amount of time in which to decide which objects are to be displayed on a particular scan line and which objects have collided with other objects is limited by the amount of time the video processing circuitry takes to scan the raster lines in the image. Since this scanning is a fast process, the amount of time to process the data describing each object to make decisions about it is limited. Ultimately, this limits the number of objects that a system can handle and thereby limits the number of objects and players that the system can successfully cope with.
Accordingly, a need has arisen for a video game processing system that can rapidly handle large numbers of objects and player inputs to cause motion in desired directions of some of said objects and which can rapidly detect collisions between many such objects and many other objects on the playfield.
Further, a need has arisen for a video game system which can gracefully handle multi stamp motion objects which are larger than one stamp wide and one stamp tall. A stamp is a group of pixels and lines, generally rectangular and generally 8 pixels wide and 8 scan lines tall, which is used to provide the shape of the motion object. The pixels are written with data words which define the color or shade of gray at each location in the stamp to define the identity of the motion object by its shape. Heretofore, motion objects have been only one stamp wide. This limits the size and complexity of character shapes which could be drawn on the screen because the number of pixels available for coloring was too small to define truly complex character shapes. Thus, as the sophistication of game users has increased, there has arisen a need to be able to provide them with more colorful and complex character shapes.